An aubade is a morning love poem/song, though it is sometimes about lovers separating at dawn. If you search for aubades online, you will find many using that as a title that do not follow the morning-lovers motif. Since there is no fixed meter or rhyme for the form, there is usually no way to identify a poem easily as an aubade.
This month's model poem is one that I found that follows that original definition. What I find interesting in Dore Kiesselbach's "Aubade" is that the loved ones are a mother and child.
Aubade is a French word meaning "dawn serenade" that first appears in English in the 1670s. In English, it came to be used for a song or poem of lovers parting at dawn, and later it came to refer to songs sung in the morning hours. Today, we think of a serenade as a song sung in the evening, so a "morning serenade" is a bit of an oxymoron.
In earlier centuries, the aubade had an even narrower definition of being a lyric sung, said or addressed to a sleeping lover by the departing lover. That may be an idea for your own aubade this month.
We will be strict with our prompt and ask that you write a poem set in the morning and related to leaving a loved one - "leaving" and "loved one" are open to interpretations.
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